...Uhm.
This isn't my very best work possible, as I didn't read it through after I finished and most likely won't, but... yeha.
Be warned that this is a story that touches on some pretty controversial themes and has slight graphic violence. Don't say I didn't' mention it.
The Forsaken~
It didn't take long for the town to vanish through the trees. Between the thickness of the foliage, the speed at which she moved, and the sharply curving hills and valleys, the grey, mechanical, fumed village was behind her. Before long, she would reach the transiency portal and be done with it.
This transiency was not her home--far form it. Anri wasn’t just an angel, she was an Inquirer--a muse of science. However, her brown, falcon-like wings were bound against her back with tight ropes and thin, black cell armor. Drugged, half-awake, and tortured, with wild eyes and long red scars along her half-exposed torso, she was as different form her normal self as she possibly could be. Yet, unlike the shifting state of being and timeline that defined a dimensional transiency--one such dimension as she was now fleeing--these changes were permanent. Her matted, bushy brown hair would never lose its bloody clumps and spilt ends. Her eyes would always be hollow and bloodshot. Curiosity's Muse had been scarred. She was afraid to ask now. She was afraid to wonder what would happen if she did something. Curiosity itself, a driving force of knowledge, was broken--in a state of kanli.
The sharp thorns, half of them metal and half barbed and red-tipped, caught at her tattered green capris and her stray brown feathers. She ignored the pain of her primaries being torn from her broken left wing and the constant tripping and stumbling. Thrice she feel on her face, getting mud in her wounds and salty tears on the ground, but thrice she stood again. This would be the last portal in millennia, Marsiea had warned her. But Anri had been too curious, to distracted by the concept of such a wild, rogue steampunk transiency to listen. It had seemed to amazing, and she had too many questions. So Marsiea opened a portal and let her in. Anri didn’t notice the sad look that the elder Muse of Enlightenment gave her younger sister, despite doing her duty, as Anri did hers by sating her endless thirst for comprehension.
She came to regret embracing her duty so fully.
The villagers were as wonderful and amazing as Anri had hoped. Aviators, mechanics, walking clockwork with advanced AI that made them almost alive, children grown in facilities to have mature minds early on. Yet it was missing something important--always so silent, so somber. Like somebody everyone knew and cared for had died just yesterday and everyone was numb. even the natural -born children acted at least fifty.
The village was once a sanctuary to travellers coming in form the surrounding wilderness. Built form the scraps of a great steam-run city next to the hollow crater of a dried hot spring, it was the only checkpoint in the harsh jungles. The predators within were half-robotic, emotionless killing machines, "berserked"--lost all sanity to bloodlust-- from the army of an old empire. The monsters wandered most of the cruel shambles left behind by the once-flourishing world on the olive moon that orbited a planet once known as "Authr". The original spelling of the name, in all original dialects of its civilizations, had been lost to the millennia.
They said that the moon had one been a comet, but was slowed by a black hole and chipped away gradually as it drifted, eventually coming to a stop at this mostly void galaxy and orbiting "Authr". It was then inhabited by the major populations of this fertile planet, who were drowning in their masses. But these were just rumors, the same mythology as the ones that suggested deities or benevolent gods who created the galaxy and especially the blue planet. That had been beaten out here.
In Anri's transiency, that sort of thinking was still common, still accepted as what may have been fact. Not here. So many important things had been beaten out here, like a criminal's speakings. Among these were also emotion. The populace came to a halt, not able to move ahead because of what they had lost.
Liberty. Love. Beauty. It was all lost. And so, too, was curiosity.
Anri tried to bring the lonely, empty inhabitants something of beauty. She sang to them, a ballad about the God she chose to believe in. He was kind and loving to all He created, and forgave His people because of how much He cared for them. He created them to be His people, and she sang of how much she loved Him.
They recognized every sound she made as foreign and came out of their bronze and grey shelters with staffs, poles, blades, anything. the beat her down, broke one of her wings, and tried to tear out her heart with their nails--some non-existent, some sharpened metal talons, some long and caked with dirt.
Anri now had a bloody scar on her chest where the had clawed at her. The tatters of her olive-colored shirt were now stained red and black. Red with her blood and black with the filth of their empty minds.
Anri tried to flee then, but it was too late. They tied her down, sealing her back with the black cell mail. Its tiny black loops, reminiscent of chain mail, fused with her skin, holding her unbroken right wing to her back and made a vulnerable canvas to injure. From the silvery judgement hall at the center of the village, a patchwork of white marble pillars and roughly concealed giant gears that twisted with the flow of the time that didn't seem to move at all, came a man in a perfect black suit with long coattails. His dark brown hair, a sharp contrast to Anri's honeyish brunette locks and the other villager’s hair that was so matted with filth it was impossible to tell the color, was perfectly neat and perfectly clean. He looked down at Anri with scorn, down the angle of his pointed nose. The only emotion he showed was contempt.
Anri begged him to let her go. She explained her role as the Muse of Curiosity as quickly as she could, pressing her importance to other transiencies and dimensions. She asked him to release her and swore she'd never return. Anri knew now what a transiency really was--a doomed dimension. A place of no life. A kanli dimension--broken, unfixable, abandoned. Impermanent. A transiency, she now knew, should never be touched. She said all of this as her hot and salty tears began to stain the ground, making the scratches on her cheeks burn with a white-hot, salty pain and wetting the dry, dusty ground where it wasn't red or puddled with oil.
He denied her her liberty and made the rough-handed villagers chain her to a cold metal wall.
He whipped her fourty-two times with a black whip.
Only when he was sure that she was lost did he let her body go free.
And yet, as he broke her chains, he told her that he'd simply given her what she wanted. His hoarse voice was tainted by cruel, rocky laughter. He had given her, he said with a slight shriek as he bent close to her once-clear pale face, a taste of what it was like in this lost dimension.
She couldn't bring herself to stand for two hours. They ignored her and the pools of her blood. It started to snow, and the snow was acidic, burning like tiny fireballs.
Still she remained on her knees.
With the acid rain, her face began to fall off. Thin and papery, shed like a snake's skin. It fell and left behind an empty visage, hideous, with heavy features and deep wrinkles. The old skin dissolved into the ground.
At last, she stood and started shuffling off to the jungle, where she'd found the portal.
In the jungle, a monster attacked. She didn't remember the details--just a metallic flash, a snapping that may have been her bone or its, and fleeing. She ran as fast as she could, when under normal circumstances she would ahve stayed long enough to figure out what it was.
Now she didn’t care.
Curiosity was gone form her life.
When she reached the portal, it was almost too late. The blue runes were flickering, about to shatter. With a hoarse cry, she leapt through, leaving behind the transiency and the monster. But she also left behind her stolen curiosity.
When Marsiea saw the remains of Anri, she pulled her gun form her belt and shot her in the head without a moment's hesitation.
This isn't my very best work possible, as I didn't read it through after I finished and most likely won't, but... yeha.
Be warned that this is a story that touches on some pretty controversial themes and has slight graphic violence. Don't say I didn't' mention it.
The Forsaken~
It didn't take long for the town to vanish through the trees. Between the thickness of the foliage, the speed at which she moved, and the sharply curving hills and valleys, the grey, mechanical, fumed village was behind her. Before long, she would reach the transiency portal and be done with it.
This transiency was not her home--far form it. Anri wasn’t just an angel, she was an Inquirer--a muse of science. However, her brown, falcon-like wings were bound against her back with tight ropes and thin, black cell armor. Drugged, half-awake, and tortured, with wild eyes and long red scars along her half-exposed torso, she was as different form her normal self as she possibly could be. Yet, unlike the shifting state of being and timeline that defined a dimensional transiency--one such dimension as she was now fleeing--these changes were permanent. Her matted, bushy brown hair would never lose its bloody clumps and spilt ends. Her eyes would always be hollow and bloodshot. Curiosity's Muse had been scarred. She was afraid to ask now. She was afraid to wonder what would happen if she did something. Curiosity itself, a driving force of knowledge, was broken--in a state of kanli.
The sharp thorns, half of them metal and half barbed and red-tipped, caught at her tattered green capris and her stray brown feathers. She ignored the pain of her primaries being torn from her broken left wing and the constant tripping and stumbling. Thrice she feel on her face, getting mud in her wounds and salty tears on the ground, but thrice she stood again. This would be the last portal in millennia, Marsiea had warned her. But Anri had been too curious, to distracted by the concept of such a wild, rogue steampunk transiency to listen. It had seemed to amazing, and she had too many questions. So Marsiea opened a portal and let her in. Anri didn’t notice the sad look that the elder Muse of Enlightenment gave her younger sister, despite doing her duty, as Anri did hers by sating her endless thirst for comprehension.
She came to regret embracing her duty so fully.
The villagers were as wonderful and amazing as Anri had hoped. Aviators, mechanics, walking clockwork with advanced AI that made them almost alive, children grown in facilities to have mature minds early on. Yet it was missing something important--always so silent, so somber. Like somebody everyone knew and cared for had died just yesterday and everyone was numb. even the natural -born children acted at least fifty.
The village was once a sanctuary to travellers coming in form the surrounding wilderness. Built form the scraps of a great steam-run city next to the hollow crater of a dried hot spring, it was the only checkpoint in the harsh jungles. The predators within were half-robotic, emotionless killing machines, "berserked"--lost all sanity to bloodlust-- from the army of an old empire. The monsters wandered most of the cruel shambles left behind by the once-flourishing world on the olive moon that orbited a planet once known as "Authr". The original spelling of the name, in all original dialects of its civilizations, had been lost to the millennia.
They said that the moon had one been a comet, but was slowed by a black hole and chipped away gradually as it drifted, eventually coming to a stop at this mostly void galaxy and orbiting "Authr". It was then inhabited by the major populations of this fertile planet, who were drowning in their masses. But these were just rumors, the same mythology as the ones that suggested deities or benevolent gods who created the galaxy and especially the blue planet. That had been beaten out here.
In Anri's transiency, that sort of thinking was still common, still accepted as what may have been fact. Not here. So many important things had been beaten out here, like a criminal's speakings. Among these were also emotion. The populace came to a halt, not able to move ahead because of what they had lost.
Liberty. Love. Beauty. It was all lost. And so, too, was curiosity.
Anri tried to bring the lonely, empty inhabitants something of beauty. She sang to them, a ballad about the God she chose to believe in. He was kind and loving to all He created, and forgave His people because of how much He cared for them. He created them to be His people, and she sang of how much she loved Him.
They recognized every sound she made as foreign and came out of their bronze and grey shelters with staffs, poles, blades, anything. the beat her down, broke one of her wings, and tried to tear out her heart with their nails--some non-existent, some sharpened metal talons, some long and caked with dirt.
Anri now had a bloody scar on her chest where the had clawed at her. The tatters of her olive-colored shirt were now stained red and black. Red with her blood and black with the filth of their empty minds.
Anri tried to flee then, but it was too late. They tied her down, sealing her back with the black cell mail. Its tiny black loops, reminiscent of chain mail, fused with her skin, holding her unbroken right wing to her back and made a vulnerable canvas to injure. From the silvery judgement hall at the center of the village, a patchwork of white marble pillars and roughly concealed giant gears that twisted with the flow of the time that didn't seem to move at all, came a man in a perfect black suit with long coattails. His dark brown hair, a sharp contrast to Anri's honeyish brunette locks and the other villager’s hair that was so matted with filth it was impossible to tell the color, was perfectly neat and perfectly clean. He looked down at Anri with scorn, down the angle of his pointed nose. The only emotion he showed was contempt.
Anri begged him to let her go. She explained her role as the Muse of Curiosity as quickly as she could, pressing her importance to other transiencies and dimensions. She asked him to release her and swore she'd never return. Anri knew now what a transiency really was--a doomed dimension. A place of no life. A kanli dimension--broken, unfixable, abandoned. Impermanent. A transiency, she now knew, should never be touched. She said all of this as her hot and salty tears began to stain the ground, making the scratches on her cheeks burn with a white-hot, salty pain and wetting the dry, dusty ground where it wasn't red or puddled with oil.
He denied her her liberty and made the rough-handed villagers chain her to a cold metal wall.
He whipped her fourty-two times with a black whip.
Only when he was sure that she was lost did he let her body go free.
And yet, as he broke her chains, he told her that he'd simply given her what she wanted. His hoarse voice was tainted by cruel, rocky laughter. He had given her, he said with a slight shriek as he bent close to her once-clear pale face, a taste of what it was like in this lost dimension.
She couldn't bring herself to stand for two hours. They ignored her and the pools of her blood. It started to snow, and the snow was acidic, burning like tiny fireballs.
Still she remained on her knees.
With the acid rain, her face began to fall off. Thin and papery, shed like a snake's skin. It fell and left behind an empty visage, hideous, with heavy features and deep wrinkles. The old skin dissolved into the ground.
At last, she stood and started shuffling off to the jungle, where she'd found the portal.
In the jungle, a monster attacked. She didn't remember the details--just a metallic flash, a snapping that may have been her bone or its, and fleeing. She ran as fast as she could, when under normal circumstances she would ahve stayed long enough to figure out what it was.
Now she didn’t care.
Curiosity was gone form her life.
When she reached the portal, it was almost too late. The blue runes were flickering, about to shatter. With a hoarse cry, she leapt through, leaving behind the transiency and the monster. But she also left behind her stolen curiosity.
When Marsiea saw the remains of Anri, she pulled her gun form her belt and shot her in the head without a moment's hesitation.
